


Pond In The Forest

by kidonthemountain



Category: Original Work
Genre: Mermaids, Original Story - Freeform, Short Story, fantasy fiction, mermaid, woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:02:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27046174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kidonthemountain/pseuds/kidonthemountain
Summary: - This is something I wrote ages ago, I only gave it a quick look-over so there may be spelling errors here and there. I may come back to fix and/or add to this later. -- Not looking for constructive criticism as of now -





	Pond In The Forest

**Chapter One**   
**Michigan, October**

The gravel crunched under my worn boots as I stepped carefully around the small blow-up pool as to not trip on it. Treading in the faint glow of the moonlight I rubbed my nose, hoping to warm it up for the icy air had made it feel slightly frozen. I was making my way towards the lake past the trees and sleeping campers, wishing I were in my tent now, sleeping cozily in my toasty sleeping bag instead of meeting my friend in the middle of the night by the lake. And yes, this would have seemed suspicious if I hadn’t known the other boy for years and was used to the idea of sharing my own clothes with him.“Hey boy, what are you doin’ out here?” I jumped, quickly turning around to come face to face with a dark figure taller than him.  
I stuttered, terrified “oh, well, I was just…”  
The figure laughed, flicking a switch on something in his hand and shining a light in front of his face; it was the one he’d been looking for. “Andy, you bastard,” I said, about to give him a piece of his mind before Andy shut me up by shoving something into my hands.  
“Forgot your flashlight, you’re not going to be able to see without it,” Andy said.  
“Where are we going?” I said.  
“Into the woods, I wanna show you something I found. I think you’ll see it, too.”  
We walked for a couple minutes, me following Andy into the forest when I realized something.  
“Wait, stop,” I said.  
“Yeah?”  
“What do you mean ‘I’ll see it, too’?” I asked, squinting into the flashlight’s glare.  
“You’ll see, just wait.”  
So we continued on, with me trying to trust Andy to not lead them too far astray. But even though believing something like that was mostly lying to oneself, I continued on. Intrigued by Andy’s choice of words, and wanting to see what the object was. We walked for about ten minutes, and at that point I was praying that my family had not noticed my absence yet. Though sadly I was sure Andy’s parents wouldn’t care about his absence. When we arrived at a rather large pond, I was surprised that no one had ever made a swimming hole out of this. Then I realized something.  
“Andy, are we on someone’s property?” I asked quietly.  
“Yeah, so?” he responded.  
“Andy, we need to get out of here, what if we get caught?”  
“Oh don’t be like that,” he stuck his hand in the water and waved in around a bit.  
“Are you serious? That water had to be like ice, I’m not getting in there.”  
He shook his head but didn’t look back at me.  
My chest seized when a hand reached out of the murky water to grab hold of Andy’s arm. Falling backwards I let out a yelp and stared. Andy was patting the hand now and I was wide eyed.  
“Is someone down there?” then it dawned on me, “is this a prank?”  
“No prank,” Andy said, staring down into the water. Then something black and moss like floated up out of the water, then something dark olive and smooth attached to it, then something that resembled a human nose, then a mouth. It was a face, a face that looked a combination of fearful and amused. I shone my flashlight into the girl’s face, a ridiculously confused expression on his face, making the girl cover her wide dark eyes.  
“So you drug me out here to show me a girl swimming? She’s gonna catch a cold if you don’t get her out of there. This was a dumb prank, you scared the shit out of me though, congrats.”  
“Listen, Isaac, it’s not a prank. This girl is a fish!”  
I stared, completely unamused.  
“The girl. Is half fish,” he said, looking back at the girl in the water staring at them.  
“That’s ridiculous.” I said, shocked.  
“You can’t see it since it’s dark out now. But I saw it- she has a fin.”  
“A what?” I said dumbly.  
Andy looked exasperated.  
“Look, how about we come back in the morning, and you show me then, huh?” I said, taking Andy by the shoulder and hoping to coax him out of his stupidity.  
He swallowed hard then nodded.  
“Yeah, okay, let’s go back.”  
He looked back to look for the girl, but she was gone.  
Walking back seemed to take a lot less time than getting there did. The next morning I woke at the crack of dawn to check on Andy. Andy lived on the other side of the trees behind my camping spot, and our families would usually meet daily. I didn’t have the patience today to wait for everyone to wake up. Knocking on the large camper’s door I was almost instantly greeted with Andy’s father; Frank, clad only in his boxers. I turned away from the sight, grimacing on the inside.  
“Hey, where’s Andrew?”  
“He went for a walk, left about seven minutes ago,”  
“Okay, thanks,” I said, starting to walk away. Then it hit me like a smack to the face; the pond, of course the pond.  
When I arrived at the forest where I believed Andy had taken me last night I had to stop running. The forest was too thick to run through; with the fallen tree limbs and the large rocks and low branches. So it was slow going after that, hoping that I knew what I was doing coming back here. And wondering what I would say and how I’d get out of it if I was caught by the property owner. Would I tell them that I was looking for my friend? Soon I could smell the nearby body of water; that musty, swampy smell that made me crinkle my nose.  
“Andrew!” I hissed loudly, not wanting to shout in case that there was a home nearby, just beyond the trees. “It’s me!”  
“Over here,” I heard another’s voice call from behind me. I turned to see Andy coming out from behind a birch tree.  
“What were you doing?” I asked.  
“I thought you were someone else, following me,” he said back, walking towards me then clasping a large hand on my shoulder. “What are you doing out here?”  
“I was looking for you.”  
“Why?” he questioned, crinkling his face into a smile.  
“Because God knows what you were doing out here,” I whispered.  
“No need to whisper, Isaac, the old man’s as deaf as a post.”  
“How do you know who lives here?” Isaac asked.  
‘Oh’ was all he said along with a few ‘umms’ and ‘wells’. But then he was leading me towards the pond, then he did what he did yesterday. He stuck his hand in the murky water and waved it around. When nothing happened, he waved his hand again.  
I was getting irritated at this point.  
“I’m trying to get her to come up,” he said, looking back up to me. Then I noticed that he looked like he hadn’t slept all night. He had dark bags around his eyes and his normally dark olive toned face looked pale and sickly all of a sudden.  
“Andy what’s wrong with you? You look terrible, you’ve lost it. I think your parents have been putting too much pressure on you, you need to take a break!” I said sadly.  
“No,” he said quietly back to me, “no, just wait.”  
I saw exactly what I saw last night; what looked to be black moss rising from the murky water, and then a face was in front of us. I was shocked, there was no way that girl could have gotten into the water without me seeing and no one could have held their breath that long.  
“What do you think of that, Isaac? Think I’m hallucinating now?”  
“What is she?” I said, walking closer. Then she swam closer towards the shore, her small body making ripples in the water and long dark hair flowing behind her. I smiled at her gently, and she looked at me blankly.  
“I think most people would call her a mermaid,” he responded, looking completely serious.  
I couldn’t help but laugh, “a mermaid? You’ve got to be joking.”  
He didn’t appear to be joking at all, in fact even though it was so unlike him, he appeared very stern and worried. “Do you think the old man knows about this?”  
“I doubt it… hey man, do you think we’ve been drugged?”  
“No, I don’t think we’d be having the same hallucinations.”  
“Right, so there’s just this random mermaid in this random pond in the backyard of an old guy’s house,” I said, looking at him.  
“Why, do you suppose there are more of them in there?”  
I paused, I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation.  
The… mermaid, was now sitting on a large flat stone with her tail still in the water. But now that it was closer to the top of the murky water I could see the scales that ran all over her tail, following up to her stomach and her chest. They were dark like her hair and dull, not shiny like you see in picture books.  
“Why do you think she doesn’t speak, do you think she understands us?” Andy said, staring at her.  
I waved him off, not feeling like answering his dumb questions. The mermaid seemed to tense up when I approached her, but she leaned in the way I did and tilted her head examining my face as I did hers. I noticed that she looked almost completely human from the chest up, not the waist up for she had gills on her sides. She looked at my legs oddly, then up to my face again like I’d suddenly grown a second head.  
“Do you think that anyone would believe us?” I heard Andy say from behind me.  
“No,” I responded, turning my head around to look at him. “They’d think we’d lost it and put us in therapy.”  
“You really think so?”  
“Yeah, or they’d think it was some dumb prank. Hell, I’m still not even sure if this is a dream or not.” I turned back to the mermaid, hoping she would say something when I noticed that all of the sounds around us had grown quiet. There were no frogs croaking or birds chirping, and the sound of the crickets had died down. Soon I fell very still, looking around like something was about to jump out and grab me. That’s when I saw something out of the corner of my eye that hadn’t been there before. I turned to look and almost fell backwards again. There was a face in the water- faces, actually, with large eyes and long flowing hair.  
I stuttered “Andy look!” pointing towards the water.  
“What?” he said looking at me oddly. Then he saw them, too, “there are more!” he said, kneeling by the water. The other mermaids didn’t seem to give a hoot for Andy, baring their sharp teeth at him. He backed up from their angry glares, hands raised. “They don’t look too friendly, Isaac,” he said, not taking his gaze away from them.  
I looked over to the first mermaid, who furrowed her brows at the others and let out a long hiss. I gave a tug to the sleeve of Andy’s shirt to and when I turned to look I waved a ‘come on’ motion with my hand. I started to walk hopefully quietly away from the scene and wasn’t surprised when Andy followed. Soon we were jogging away from the pond and the mermaids and through the forest quickly. We stopped jogging when we reached the dirt road and began walking, but instead of going back to our individual homes for now we walked towards the park.  
“What the hell is going on, Isaac?” Andy asked, on the verge of panicking.  
“I don’t know” I responded weakly, sitting on the creaky swing.  
“I mean, seriously, what the hell? What are we supposed to make of this, and how are we going to keep it a secret?”  
“I just said I don’t know.” I responded again, a little exasperated.  
It took a long minute, but Andy spoke again. “No, I got it, I know what we’re going to do!”  
I raised my eyebrows at him, “what?”  
“Why don’t we go up to the old guy that lives on the property? Hasn’t he lived there his whole life?”  
“How would I know? Andy, we’ve only been living at this campground for a month. We have no way of knowing that,” I said, wondering where he had even gotten that idea.  
“Yes, we do know that. I asked the man that runs the little flea market downtown. He’s been here forever, too. He said the guy was born in that house and he’d been there ever since.”  
‘Oh’ was all I responded with.  
“Hey, guys!” we both recognized that piercing voice; it was Andy’s younger sister; Carrie. Andy caught my eye and put a finger vertically over his full lips and we fell silent.  
She came skipping over, her little white dress flowing behind her in the wind, and sat on the swing net to me. She studied us both individually, and then raised a brow. Carrie was eleven, but incredibly intelligent for her age. She knew when people were keeping secrets, just like her brother.  
“What’s going on?” she asked in a sly voice.  
“Nothing,” Andy carelessly lied.  
“Don’t lie to me, Andrew,” she warned calmly, swinging her legs back and forth.  
Andy tried to stare Carrie down for a few moments, but when she didn’t respond he said “Carrie, can you wait here just for just a few?” and nodded me over to the slide.  
“Do you think we should tell her?” he asked.  
“She’s eleven, not five,” I responded.  
“We could show her” he suggested, “tomorrow.”  
I gave that a thought; maybe having more people see it would make it more real for me? Yeah, could give that a shot. “Okay, yeah, we’ll do that as soon as we get the chance.”

. . . 

  
**Michigan, November**

The leaves crackled under the pressure of our boots, making a ton of noise in the middle of the mostly dead silence of the cooling forest. It was eight at night and we only had until nine until curfew; that gave us a few minutes to get there, half hour there, then the few minutes back. Andy was leading the way, with Carrie in front of me and me at the back so she didn’t get left behind. Like that would have happened; Carrie had been nagging at Andy for days when she heard there was a secret she was to keep. But Andy was terrified that she would tell everyone and they would come to check it out to find the mermaids.  
We were both certain that she wouldn’t believe us. Given that Andy was quite the known liar and Carrie knew I was a thief. So we decided to show her instead. We weren’t even certain that she would follow us into the woods, but she did. When we reached the little pond there were no mermaids in sight, and no old man.


End file.
